Musings & Meanderings

There’ve been many rounds of conversation in recent years about the term users. Many dislike it intensely. I’ve always had a ‘…just don’t call me late for dinner’ attitude to this term, finding it perfectly appropriate in some circumstances and less so in others. Instead of looking for an alternative generic term that encompasses every single person using a computer for any reason, I usually try to make the terminology congruent with the activity. Sort of an ‘it is what it does’ approach.

Here are some examples of terms I use:

1. audience
2. citizen
3. constituent
4. contributor
5. customer
6. member
7. participant
8. service provider
9. user
10. vendor
11. viewer
12. visitor

Last week’s conversation about Glam, on Michael Arrington’s and Jeff Jarvis’s blogs (here and here), got me thinking about this again, and realizing just how overly broad the definitions of our different roles here is. In many ways, those of us who’ve been around for some time still tend to think of geeks vs non-techs in terms of both support and business, of active users vs lurkers (and worse) in terms of forums and communities, and so on. These two-sided definitions make sense when observing and comprehending online activity from the perspective of personal experience. The more you broaden that perspective, however, the more variant roles and activities become, begging further definition. Beyond a core group, whether it’s social or special interest or a dev team, are far more complex communities and, further, entire societies.

Glam, for example, illustrates how increasingly professional bloggers and web publishers have become sub-contractors for advertisers. This may be a fairly traditional media model, but the old publishing definitions of writer and reader don’t fit the same way here. Whether we’re offering opinion, analysis, or entertainment online, the moment we start selling advertising we become a vendor of space in a way closer to a landlord model than to any other. The advertiser isn’t paying us for our attention, but for the numbers of other ‘eyeballs’ we can attract. So Glam and similar sites are, in effect, supporting a range of commercial activity that spans the entire marketing and media gamut from product to customer. Glam has users and its users have users, and so on.

The media model is one of the more complex ones, especially where it overlaps with pure free speech, but there are many other ecosystems developing in which one of the activities only is the exchange of goods and/or services. The difficulty with new role definitions here is that we each can play far more of them, and in more ways, than ever before. User, whether you love, hate, or are indifferent to the term, doesn’t come close to recognizing the range of multiple roles of a billion people beginning to create new ecocosms. There are hundreds of categories and thousands of definitions of hardware and software. There are endless business and job categories. Shouldn’t we have at least as many for the users? There are more of us, doing more various things, than in either of the first 2 groups, which some of us are also part of.

Me Tarzan …you Jane. See Spot run …to get online and click here? Machines are awesome, something I’ve believed in since I discovering Lotus 123 and DBase II about 25 years ago. Free societies, with free speech and free enterprise, are pretty awesome too. Advancing our comprehension of, and communication about, the latter up to the level of the former, is a goal worth pursuing, imo. What do you think?

A recent part time activity of mine has included some detective work which led me, among other things to a particular IP block. These 255 IP addresses, on which you could probably host hundreds of thousands of websites, show a very short list of users, but most of the info is phony, including the provider, tech support, and abuse contact info. The block is listed as registered to NTT America. The first time I called them, the tech taking my call cheerfully entered the IP numbers I gave him, froze into silence, started stuttering, and ended, after several attempts, with a tentative sounding statement that they do not have that block listed after all. Further lookup shows the block as belonging to a netherworld where blocks created before any registries existed reside.

The contact with NTT started me thinking about the ingrained distrust of big business among denizens of the web. This distrust, regardless of whether it is political in origin, has become an unquestioned tenet of faith in many segments of modern society, sometimes with less basis than we require before accepting a religious tenet.

As I often repeat, neither businesses nor currencies are bad. It is people who do right or wrong.

There are many tech and non-tech small business owners on the web. There are plenty of techs and devs who eat based on their ability to get paid for their skill sets on a consulting basis, and who also believe in a peer to peer social and economic model. Individuals, service providers or consumers, represent the vast majority of the population using the internet. Big business, venture capitalists, and public companies, however, represent the vast majority of both investment and ownership of all the resources here. Understanding these entities, and dealing with them, is unavoidable for anyone interested in new or alternative models of any sort.

NTT America, Inc. is a privately owned subsidiary of a Japanese corporation. Whether they are as big as AT&T is not publicly known, although they are enterprise driven and undoubtedly more profitable that the Texas based creation spawned by baby bell. Many fret about Google as well, but as a consumer driven company (and without looking at politics or behind the scenes), they should, imo, rank pretty low on the list of big companies whose interests conflict with those of the general population. Anyone who wants more information about a home grown public company such as this can also become a shareholder. Tracking hacker activity to a company such as NTT, only to hear them expresses no interest in correcting the fact that they are publicly registered as responsible for the hosting block, concerns me far more than what an American public company might do.

A public company is a powerful vehicle. The attendant legal structures offer opportunity for various lucrative occupations, such as stock market promotion, which contribute little to society in general. Regardless of this, the vast majority of large companies remain law abiding and respectable. We don’t worry about GM or P&G taking control of our activities or limiting our freedoms. What makes technology different in this respect is its potential for invasiveness. We are right to be vigilant, but vigilance by itself will make little difference to how the next stage of growth is constituted. The only thing that can make a difference is understanding and involvement.

Peer to peer interactions as a class of business aren’t currently more than a speck on the entire landscape. Those who care about liberty and autonomy would do well to adopt a larger focus. In the same way that media and a few other big businesses are struggling to develop micro-management of electronic relationships and communication with customers, the independent operators should be developing macro visions based, not on the ‘wisdom of crowds’, but on the power of many. A group of many with modest to reasonable means can elect world leaders and influence economies just as a few individuals wielding vast resources can.

The current corporate business models are, in practice, the most likely to influence events and lives. The only thing that can change this is alternative models of a competitive size. Consider building, joining, contributing to, or at least endorsing one. The more of us who have a personal stake in electronically based businesses, the more we know and trust one another in the marketplace and personally, the less we’ll need to worry about potential threats posed by others.

During the weekend, I was temporarily laid flat by, apparently, a flare up of inflammation starting at the nerve roots at the site of my spinal surgery. Despite the fact that I’ve lived with constant pain since 1980, there are always new levels which can take my breath away. Much of that impact has to do with the element of surprise, and also of not knowing whether an unbearable escalation is temporary, permanent, or even the beginning of something worse. Having a root canal without anesthetic, after my surgeon had watched me have an allergic reaction to each of the numerous unrelated anesthetics he’d tried on me, was easy in comparison to being ambushed by unexpected and unending pain.

We can learn to endure and accept astonishing levels of pain. Of the thousands of people that I’ve known and worked with over the past 27 years, barely a handful were cognizant of my having any health problems at all, even when they had been told that I did, and even when they’d seen me during the few years when I needed a wheelchair to get around. In the past, I found this baffling, and interpreted it as meaning that I should keep my physical disabilities a secret. This practice has worked well enough for most business dealings and non-intimate relationships. My pain isn’t me. It is one part of my private self. However, this also means that, for me, the potential for close relationships with others is limited by having to find people who can both learn to interact comfortably with someone they know is in severe pain, and who can delineate between a particular handicap and the rest of the person bearing it.

In fact, many people prefer not to know and can’t cope with even the idea of a ’sick’ person. Others invoke a mechanism which relegates any ‘invalid’ to the sidelines for the benevolent sounding purpose of convalescence. Go away now, dear, and come back when you feel better. My saddest observation is of others with some physical handicap who have internalized a view of themselves as ineligible to participate, or who have adopted elements of either victimhood or martyrdom, or both, in an unhealthy co-dependent response to those around them. My most inspiring observations are of the opposite cases, where individuals learn to accommodate a physical handicap, including pain, and manage to use all their skills and abilities which are unimpaired to a fuller extent even than most perfectly healthy people do. These people often develop native abilities far beyond the norm, and also far beyond a threshold of simple compensation. They can become extraordinary first because they have to, and further because of realizing that they can.

So, having a number of hours over the weekend to indulge my fondness for popular fiction, I should have been reading a Lincoln Rhyme novel, from the series by Jeffery Deaver, which features a brilliant detective who also happens to be a paraplegic. Instead, I read the ending of Scott Turow’s Ordinary Heroes. Although I would read anything written by Scott Turow (I’d add a brief on tort law to my bedtime reading if it was penned by him), I’d hesitated to buy Ordinary Heroes when it first came out. A son’s insight into a father’s memoir recounting a personal experience of WWII did not sound congruent with my recent personal challenges and state of mind. By their nature, such memoirs, real or fictionalized, tend to include agonized personal responses to pain, death, and sometimes torture. My reading this book at all is a measure of Scott’s ability to tell stories about flawed people in a flawed society without ever discarding an abiding faith in humanity and in the miracle of life. The book ends with an emphasis on the extent to which we invent our own lives, celebrating the triumph of free will juxtaposed against even the most powerful external forces.

Pain comes in many forms. Beginning as the age of 9, I learned about loss, abandonment, abuse, and surviving entirely on one’s own. Most physical pain cannot compare to what such lessons can inflict. In my personal journeys, which have ranged across an environmental gamut from gutters to palaces, I’ve seen many who didn’t survive. I think of people whose hands I held against death who died anyway, and of those who, for one reason or another, were simply unable to surmount their personal challenges. More often, I think of those who did and accomplished things that others, with far more advantages, were unable to, of people who endured and dismissed handicaps of every sort, physical and non-physical, reaching ever forward to invent themselves and the lives they believed they deserved.

Any ordinary person can do extraordinary things. I really believe this, and belief, of course, is the only requirement.

They said cheer up …things could be worse.

I cheered up.

Sure enough …things got worse.

The more active relationships we maintain, the more we are asked for our opinion. If they’re mostly social relationships, the questions range from ‘which restaurant for dinner’ and ‘what’s our take on the new guy in our crowd’ to requests for common interest commentary on sports, film, books, whatever. In active, successful business relationships, we’re constantly asked about anything from deal points to personal reputation ratings to predicting the future.

The people closest to you ‘know what you think’, and can probably also describe your official position on most important things, from politics to marriage to sex. Eventually your persona can get developed to the point where there are multiple versions of the same package tailored to levels of familiarity and interaction (enter FaceBook). The full story is for those closest to you, then there’s a summary version, the short version, the sanitized short version, …the Twitter version.

When was the last time someone asked you a question that made you not only stop and think about the answer, but perhaps even examine some of your beliefs? The sort of question that couldn’t be answered instantly, that couldn’t be answered fully within the confines of chat or forums, email or a blog post, that couldn’t be answered without some serious thought and exchange of views?

When was the last time you asked someone a question that startled them, made them look at you intently wondering if you really wanted to know, or elicited a surprised, “No one’s ever asked me that before!”.

Some of us have a best friend or three, maybe a business partner, maybe a spouse, who sometimes knows us better than we know ourselves, and with whom we can really share ‘thinking out loud’. Those who do often have an air of being grounded, of being at home wherever they are. Whether that’s a result of finding someone to trust enough, or a measure of ability to trust, isn’t relevant for this post. What matters is that the trust, in ourselves and each other, creates strength and vitality and a sense of being intensely alive in our interactions which spills over and transcends private relationships.

Our world moves ever faster and keeps getting more crowded. We live in ever more transient societies. The sound bytes keep multiplying and getting shorter because, like a long url, longer messages can get truncated, or simply drown in traffic and competing noise. Sometimes it’s noisy enough to convince you that no one is actually listening to anyone else. Please don’t buy into it. Some of us are listening, and often wishing that more speakers recognized this.

There’s a lot of awesome potential in the explosion of population and sound. Potential for connection and communication. Every voice, your voice, can be heard. Identifying correctly what people ‘want to hear’ is the standard method of being heard by many. If, however, your goal is to engage and to interact, then deeper listening for things that matter to many is the way forward.

What are the important things that you wish someone would ask you about? Why? Do you wish someone would listen to your thought and ideas? Will you listen to theirs?